We took as many as we could carry. Enough meat for twice the population of Hearth. We bled them and gutted them, cut off their heads and their hooves. It was nasty, messy, smelly work, and we laughed like demons as we carved into their bodies. When you’re that hungry, butchery is nothing. It’s fun.
Covered in blood, stinking of shit, we brought the carcasses home. What turns my stomach to think of now was at the time the grandest thing in the world. We dug fire pits in ground that wasn’t frozen over anymore. We burned wood until we had hot coals, and we roasted all that pig until the smell made the entire town crazy.
Some of them grabbed at the pigs on the spits, tore at the flesh before it was even fully cooked. Some people sat and waited, forks in their hands, plates on their laps, their knees bouncing up and down in anticipation.
We ate so much we got sick. We ate so much we rolled on the ground in pain, but with smiles on our faces. We laughed and made jokes and rubbed our swollen bellies. Some of us danced and sang and clapped to keep time. And then we ate some more.
Spring had come, and winter was over, and it was good.
CHAPTER 120
With spring in the air, the real work of Hearth could start again. We had survived—more than half of us—the greatest test we thought we would ever face, and we approached the new year with surprising optimism and joy, considering all the death and privation we’d just escaped. Maybe because of it. There is a point where tragedy becomes inspiration. I had read in the library of the Black Death of Europe, and how, when it finally ended, a continent-wide party had broken out that lasted for years. Hearth went through much the same transformation, on a much smaller scale.
With our bellies full, our thoughts turned to other pleasures. There were new romantic rendezvous being whispered and giggled about every night, and more than one fight broke out over who was with whom. We sang and told stories around a bonfire almost every night, and Kylie even organized a dance by torchlight. She had found a book on dancing and taught us all new steps. Even the clumsiest among us took a turn, with much laughter and clapping of hands. We ate well, gorging ourselves until we started to look like humans again and less like skeletons. Our cooks had built a still, which I pretended not to know about, and jars of moonshine started showing up everywhere.
Which is not to say we weren’t industrious. We worked hard through the last weeks of March and all of April. There was plenty to do. The winter had claimed a couple of houses, their roofs collapsed under all that snow. Dozens of us came together to repair them, to put the houses back in order. The fence was sagging at one point and Macky was certain that zombies would show up any day now that the world had thawed out, so we labored tirelessly at shoring up our defenses. We built new furniture and tools for tending the few crops we managed to plant, drying racks for cured meat, window shutters to replace broken panes of glass. There were plenty of woodworking tools left in Hearth, good, precrisis stuff that never wore out or broke, and we made good use of it. One man named Grumman even started turning out little sculptures in his spare time, carved pigs and bears and even miniature zombies that were surprisingly lifelike, and these started showing up in every house as decoration.
We had very few seeds left—most of them had been eaten during the winter. But what we did have we planted and tended more lovingly and with greater attention than I imagine food crops have ever been shown before. Soon we had squash plants sprouting from the earth, and the start of tomato vines, and tiny saplings that would one day become fruit trees. We desperately needed to vary the crops and improve our diet—I knew from my reading what would happen if we tried to subsist on pig meat alone—and I sent out parties to scour the forest, looking for edible plants of any kind. I suffered and fretted constantly over where we could find the seeds to start growing some kind of grain, and beets for sugar, and even fiber plants like flax or cotton so we could eventually make our own clothes. There was a week when I was obsessed with bees, reading all I could on apiculture and how to build hives and how to catch queens, though we never did find any. Bees would have given us not just honey but wax for candles and for waterproofing rain jackets. We would have them someday, I was sure.
It was Luke, though, who had the brilliant idea to catch some pigs and put them in a corral inside our fence. If we could breed them and raise them inside town, we wouldn’t have to spend so much time hunting. Catching them turned out to be a dangerous and—I’ll admit it—hilarious proposition, as we raced around them, waving our arms and spooking them into running between hastily erected fences. Far more of them got away than we caught, but eventually we had a small herd. Luke forbade anyone from slaughtering his new pets—he wanted to see if he could domesticate them.
Little by little Hearth stopped being a place we’d found and taken over and became more and more a place we built with our own hands. We started putting up small sheds in the undeveloped lots—places to store tools, smokehouses, woodsheds to keep our firewood dry in the rain. We built a lot of outhouses that spring, to replace the open pit latrines we’d been using. We made changes to the existing buildings as well, putting up veneers over rotten siding, cutting rough shingles to replace the broken and weather-worn roofing we’d inherited. We even made paint by grinding up rocks from the stream and mixing the resulting powder with pig blood, so we could cover up the peeling walls of our houses.
The work, and the plentiful meat, put muscles on all of us. We worked all day, and when night came, we fell readily into our beds. Kylie and I barely had time for each other, with all our responsibilities. But we found a few minutes every day to talk or just hold hands or lie in each other’s arms as we lingered in bed before getting up in the morning. My love for her grew with every day that passed.
So, too, did her belly grow. It didn’t show for a long time, as she put back on the weight she’d lost over the winter. It was hard to imagine any of us getting fat—we were working too hard—but she developed a cute little potbelly that I loved to kiss. Then she mentioned that she still wasn’t getting her period, though every other woman she talked to in town had started menstruating again. When she started throwing up all the time, I think we both knew, but neither of us would say a thing.
Then one night in late May, as we lay in bed, I reached down and put my hand on her stomach. I expected her to push it away—she’d started to get self-conscious about how big it was. Instead she put her hand over mine, our fingers meshing together. She closed her eyes and started to cry, and I kissed away her tears.
And that was when I felt it. Something moving inside her. A tiny foot, kicking in dreams. A new life. A new citizen for Hearth.
CHAPTER 121
The summer came. It seemed to fly by. There was never enough time to do everything I wanted to do, everything we needed to do. I was determined not to be caught short again when winter returned. To have enough food put away that we wouldn’t suffer like that, ever again. So I pushed people. They started to grumble that maybe it was time to just relax, to enjoy the fruits of their labors.
So I announced that we would have an election. That anyone who wanted to could run against me and be the one who said when we worked and when we rested. A couple of people did throw their hats in the ring, as the saying goes. None of them got more than a handful of votes. I’d freed my people and brought them here. I’d kept them alive. A lot of people thought I’d made the right decisions. Suddenly I was officially the mayor of Hearth.
“Mayor,” I said to Kylie that night.
“They love you. You saved them. You saved us,” she said, putting her hands on my shoulders.
“Real towns have mayors,” I said. “This is a real town now.”
“You’ve earned this,” she said, and then she started to undress me. We found plenty of time for each other that night.
I had announced that the next day would be a day of rest, a celebration of our first election. J
ust about everybody slept in that morning, including me. When I did wake up, I lay in my blankets for a long time, stretching, staring at the ceiling with a big smile on my face. Kylie was up and about—I could hear water boiling in a pot nearby—but I let myself be lazy, just for a little while.
Eventually I figured I should get up and see what Kylie was doing. I dressed and stepped out of the office and found her making soup. “I’ve been reading about canning,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“It’s how you get canned goods, obviously,” she said, with a mocking look. “You put food in the cans, seal them up, and boil the cans. That kills any germs inside, and there’s no way for new germs to get in. So the food never goes bad.”
“Really?” For all the cans I’d opened in my life, it had never occurred to me to wonder why the food inside wasn’t rotten after twenty years. I’d always assumed it was just some precrisis miracle technology. This sounded too simple.
“I’m going to need cans, of course,” she told me. “We can reuse old ones, if they’re clean. But we’ll need to find a way to make new lids.” She shook her head. “I’m still figuring some of this out.”
I nodded though. It sounded like a worthwhile project. If we could can our own food, winter would never be a time of starvation again. “Make a list of all the things you need.”
“There might be some useful stuff in the hardware store,” she suggested.
I smiled. This was supposed to be our day of rest. But of course, the two of us could barely sit still these days, not when so much work needed to be done. I kissed her, then headed out of the municipal building and into the center of town. A big group of people were there, kicking a ball around a patch of grass. Having fun. I stopped to watch for a minute. It was just so good to watch my people enjoying themselves.
I was there when I heard an old, familiar, totally unwelcome sound. A mechanical roar, the noise that engines make. Motorcycle engines.
Everyone fell quiet. Everyone heard it. Everyone looked over toward our gates, toward where the road entered Hearth. We saw dust moving there, a pale cloud gathering as something disturbed the road surface.
Then one by one the motorcycles emerged from that cloud. Twenty of them. The riders wore leather jackets and pants painted with white bones, as if to show where their skeletons were. Their helmets had dark visors so we couldn’t see their faces.
The stalkers had come.
CHAPTER 122
They stopped immediately outside our gates, turned off their machines, and lowered their kickstands. For a while they just sat there astride their bikes, not moving. I headed over to the gates, putting myself between the stalkers and my people. A crowd followed behind me, pressing up close but never stepping in front of me.
Eventually one of the riders climbed off his bike. He removed his helmet, making a big show of it as he unstrapped it and lifted it away from his long blond hair, which he shook out with a flip of his chin. He looked me right in the eye and smiled.
“Hello,” he said.
I nodded back.
“I’m Costa,” he said. “Is this Hearth?”
“It is.”
Costa’s smile grew broader. “Oh, good. You’re not on the maps, you know. It took us forever to find this place. Do you think we could come in?”
“No,” I said. “You’re not welcome here. I know who you are.”
“That’s funny, since we’ve never met. Can I ask your name?”
“Finnegan.”
“Finnegan,” Costa said, as if he was tasting my name. Licking at it to see how it felt in his mouth. “Listen, Finnegan, you say you know who I am. I think what you meant to say was that you know what I am. And you’re right—I’m a stalker. A herald of the church. In this case, it was Michigan Mike who sent me. You know that name, I imagine.”
“I’ve heard it,” I admitted.
“Good! Good.” Costa looked like he’d just seen a trained seal balance a fish on the end of its nose. I half expected him to clap in approval. “Well, he asked me to come here specifically. Most of the time we stalkers just ride around where the road takes us, looking to see what we can find. But this time Michigan Mike gave us specific orders. The kind you don’t disobey. So I’m going to have to come in, one way or another.” He shrugged apologetically. “Are we really at an impasse?”
I racked my brain, trying to think of what to do. The stalkers were all armed—in fact, they were carrying the same kind of assault rifles as Colonel Parkhurst’s men, as the soldiers in the medical camp in Ohio. Government issue. I knew what those rifles could do to a crowd of people. The stalkers could just shoot through the fence and kill half of Hearth before they ran out of bullets.
If I let them in, though . . .
I knew what they’d come for. I knew that they would try to make a deal with us. Bring us into their cult—their church—and thereby earn their protection. And I knew what that protection would cost.
As long as Costa kept talking, though, he wasn’t shooting.
“Open the gates,” I called out. Behind me I could feel my people holding their collective breath. I was their mayor. This was my responsibility.
I had to do what it took to keep Hearth alive. Whatever it took.
CHAPTER 123
The stalkers wheeled their bikes inside the fence and took up strategic positions in the main square. One of them kicked the ball out of the way. There was no opportunity for me to signal Macky or call for everyone to grab their weapons—if I did so, Costa could order his men to start firing long before any of us had our guns. “Everybody go home,” I shouted, but the people of Hearth were slow to respond, only a few moving toward the houses. Up on top of the gate, in the sniper nests, the sharpshooters on watch hunkered down, keeping themselves out of sight as best as possible. That was something.
Costa took my arm and steered me toward the municipal building. As we neared the doors he spoke to me in a low, soft voice that maybe he thought was soothing.
It wasn’t.
“I’ve done this before,” Costa said. “I know what you’re feeling right now.”
“You do?” I asked him.
“You need to assert your authority. You got where you are by keeping these people in line, and now that I’m here, your position is threatened. I’m making you look weak. Sadly, that’s unavoidable. Especially when I’m really here to strengthen you.”
“By forcing my people to worship your god.”
Costa made a face like he’d just bit into an onion. “Ooh, we’re off to such a bad start already. I don’t like to argue theology on these initial visits. But let’s make one thing clear: Death is not a god. It’s an impersonal force of the universe. An abstraction for a philosophy, more than anything. Shall we go inside?”
We’d reached the door of the municipal building. Inside was the home I shared with Kylie. “No,” I said. “No, we’ll talk out here.”
“Why not? It’s a pleasant day,” Costa told me, with a thin smile. He sat down on the steps in front of the door and patted the concrete next to him. I sat down.
“My job is never easy,” he said. “I didn’t take to this line of work because I wanted a cushy position. I did it because I believe it’s important. I make people’s lives better. That’s my reward.”
“You make people sacrifice one another. Or you kill them.”
“In the name of the greater good, yes.” He leaned back on his elbows. For a long while he said nothing—he just looked out at the crowd that still milled around the square, watching them, smiling at them. “Michigan Mike,” he said finally, “wanted me to let you know something. He’s proud of you. You’ve achieved a great deal, all on your own. This place—Hearth—it’s impressive. Considering what you had to work with.”
“We’re proud of what we’ve made. What’s ours.�
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“The Christians say that pride is a sin,” Costa told me.
“You’re no Christian.”
“No.” Costa laughed at the thought. “Which is why I think pride is a good thing. A man should take pride in his work. It spurs him on to do more. You could do more, Finnegan. You could do so much more. Michigan Mike wants to help you with that. You think I’ve come here to convert you. You’re wrong.”
“Oh?” I raised an eyebrow. I was certain I knew how this was supposed to work. Like the people at the farmhouse, like the people in all the little towns we’d seen along the highway, like the people of Chicago—and Indianapolis—we were supposed to be given a choice. Convert to the skeleton cult’s dark religion or become sacrifices in its name. If the cult had something else in mind for us, though—
“No one expects you to actually become a devout little member of the church. The church doesn’t ask anyone to be faithful. Just obedient. I think, if you spend a little time thinking about things, you’ll come around to my point of view. But if you spend the rest of your life thinking we’re a bunch of lunatics worshipping a false idol, well, that’s your loss, not ours.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” I said.
Costa slapped me on the shoulder. “You’re not going to give me an inch, are you? You’re going to play this tough guy act for all it’s worth. All right. Then let’s talk business, not religion. Michigan Mike is now the grand master of four states. Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin. He’s the most important man in the church short of Anubis himself. A man like that has a lot of problems. I’m sure you can understand that, Finnegan—I’m sure you have problems of your own. When he heard about Hearth, his first thought, of course, was to crush you. Get rid of a potential threat. But he’s a wise man, Mike. He thinks everything through twice. That’s how he got to such an exalted state. He started to think, maybe a live ally is better than a dead enemy. Isn’t that wise?”
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